If there’s one thing that the new YAHOO! logo proves, it’s that a good logo still matters. Of course the new YAHOO! logo and the way it has been launched has done wonders for YAHOO! globally by making them visible to a huge audience.
For 30 days the released a single logo design that could be the new company logo, or not. And with every day that passed the global design community were whipped up into a froth. Calls of bad kerning, shouts of derision or laughter, the obligatory mention of Comic Sans, praise for some of the designs that pushed the right aesthetic buttons and calls of YAHOO! to get a decent designer to have a go, but importantly the repetition of the word YAHOO! rang around the net. If nothing else, this was a masterclass in modern marketing.
This is the old YAHOO! logo. Not bad when you compare it to the new one.
Of course, we all know now what the final logo looks like and from our perspective at Studio ROKIT we have to say, the new YAHOO! logo is pretty bad. Pretty bad because the new YAHOO! logo looks like it was put together by someone with access to the most basic colours Microsoft Paint® has to offer (sometimes it can be used to create amazing stuff – see here!)and the keys to the ‘Bevel and Emboss‘ button in Photoshop®.
The new YAHOO! logo is bad because it not only used a colour palette and styling that sickens the eye but that it is applied to a font that doesn’t have the strength, the meat on the bones to wear them. Optima, the font of choice for the internal designer at YAHOO! who job it was to deliver the 30 ideas, could not have been more wrong.
Fonts are one of the many elements in the designer’s toolkit. They allow designers to create feelings and communicate ideas and wider concepts in a million different ways. Used correctly they are your best friend, used without conscious focus they can look out of place or in a worse case scenario have a negative effect on the overall message of feeling you want to communicate. Like seasoning in food, judicious use of fonts makes a feast for the eyes, get it wrong, put curry powder in the custard and it’s a meal you’ll happily forget.
The new YAHOO! logo. A symphony of bad design, bad taste and great marketing.
To prove that a good logo still matters and, more importantly to prove that a good designer matters as well, we thought we’d have a go at creating the new YAHOO! logo To make things interesting we set ourselves a 2 minute time limit (in the real world, working for clients we spend more time and care creating the end result) to prove that even a good idea done quickly can be better than a bad idea done well.
So here you go. The new YAHOO! logo as done by Studio ROKIT in 2 minutes. A stronger font (we’ve got a soft spot for Gotham HTF), a nicer colour palette and available in shiny or flat. We quite like it. Or at least we like it more that the new YAHOO! logo. Cheers.